Fruit and veg round-up
17 August 2022 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI now have plenty of blue Swan River daisies catching up with the earlier pink ones, and, weirdly, quite a lot of the self-sown 'wild flowers' in various pots are also turning out to be (apparently blue) Swan River daisies, although the plants are smaller and their leaves are much more slender and I hadn't recognised them until they started forming flower rosettes that turned into big round white buds. Presumably this must be from seed shed last year!
These are actually preferable to the carefully-nurtured ones, since they are smaller and don't carry their flowers on the end of enormously extended -- and vulnerable! -- stems that get bashed by the washing and my bending over them to water other things :-p
The Demon Red chillies are now covered in fruit as well as fresh flowers and are still growing upwards -- the biggest plant is now twelve inches tall with fruits over an inch long. The catch-up chillies have lived up to their moniker and begun to flower and set fruit, albeit at a rate of far fewer, much larger flowers per plant; these fruits are already as large as the Demon Red ones! The really weird thing is that both varieties of chilli have downward-pointing flowers, but the Demon Red chillies then grow fruit pointing straight up in the air -- a closer look at the picture on the seed packet confirms that this is in fact expected behaviour, but it seems very odd.
(Apparently it's due to a recessive gene: https://www.bountifulgardener.com/why-are-my-peppers-growing-upside-down/#Why_Do_Peppers_Grow_Upside_Down So one way to check that the dwarf chillies haven't undesirably cross-pollinated with the larger species would be to see which way up the next generation of fruits grows... although it would be a bit late by that point!)
Some of the nasturtiums are setting seed; the first flowers didn't, and I thought they weren't going to. They have huge big pea-sized seeds, which you can apparently pickle.
I have pulled up my original two calendulas, which have been growing (and flowering) since last autumn -- their second flush of flowers this year was fairly disappointing, and they were showing signs of being embarrassingly perennial ;-p
The replacement calendulas that I planted in the expectation that the first pair would die off after setting seed are now themselves in bloom and setting seed, and I have at least one more self-sown one that I have allowed to grow on. And the old plant was occupying a large pot that could be more profitably used for other purposes!
I have rescued (and repotted into an old grape punnet, the largest container I then had available) a single dwarfed and starved Roma tomato plant, which was surplus to requirements and being thrown away; I don't know whether kind treatment and plenty of water can induce it to put out any more shoots beyond its current single stem with a few pairs of leaves on. Despite its small size it has a single pear-shaped fruit which will presumably ripen, although I think the odds of getting any further flowers out of the plant are not good. However apparently one of the 'virtues' of the Roma tomato for culinary purposes is that it produces very few seeds, which might be awkward...!
This variety is supposedly a non-hybrid bush tomato, so I thought it might be worth propagating, having already decided that I'm not going to bother saving any seed from the heritage cherry tomatoes. Apparently it is actually possible to take tomato cuttings, at least if you can induce the plant to send out side shoots -- might be an interesting project/experiment?
My thyme plant was looking very sick and massively dying back, which I assumed was due to its being pot-bound -- every time I watered it all the water just ran straight through. But when I tried repotting it there seemed to be very little root under the tangle of woody stems, which is presumably why the outer parts were all wilting; there was nothing in there but the original heavy clay soil and a lot of gravel stones, and I suspect that in my desperate attempts to keep everything alive the thyme may well have been suffering from over-watering causing root rot.
I repotted it into compressed coir-based compost to see if that would save it, and although all the wilted sections have now succumbed (and with leaves obstinately clinging on, so that I can't even strip them for use as dried herbs) the remaining few green shoots among all the woody dead branches seem to have perked up and look as if they will survive. But that may simply be the much more cautious watering regime! To be fair, it was absolutely impossible even to see the earth in the pot previously, far less touch it to gauge its moisture, and the pot was always desperately light to handle and apparently retaining no water at all...
My rudbeckias are now fully out, and looking very exotic -- this is what the chrysanthemums from last year were *supposed* to look like, creamy coloured with a striking contrast centre, instead of a uniform corn-marigold yellow!
Addendum: my garlic is busy shooting up multiple green stems like a pot of chives (I should probably have split the cloves...!), and several of the strawberry runners have successfully rooted and been detached, which probably means I should dispose of the large parent plant that failed to flower this year. (That one flower did set one single fruit...)
These are actually preferable to the carefully-nurtured ones, since they are smaller and don't carry their flowers on the end of enormously extended -- and vulnerable! -- stems that get bashed by the washing and my bending over them to water other things :-p
The Demon Red chillies are now covered in fruit as well as fresh flowers and are still growing upwards -- the biggest plant is now twelve inches tall with fruits over an inch long. The catch-up chillies have lived up to their moniker and begun to flower and set fruit, albeit at a rate of far fewer, much larger flowers per plant; these fruits are already as large as the Demon Red ones! The really weird thing is that both varieties of chilli have downward-pointing flowers, but the Demon Red chillies then grow fruit pointing straight up in the air -- a closer look at the picture on the seed packet confirms that this is in fact expected behaviour, but it seems very odd.
(Apparently it's due to a recessive gene: https://www.bountifulgardener.com/why-are-my-peppers-growing-upside-down/#Why_Do_Peppers_Grow_Upside_Down So one way to check that the dwarf chillies haven't undesirably cross-pollinated with the larger species would be to see which way up the next generation of fruits grows... although it would be a bit late by that point!)
Some of the nasturtiums are setting seed; the first flowers didn't, and I thought they weren't going to. They have huge big pea-sized seeds, which you can apparently pickle.
I have pulled up my original two calendulas, which have been growing (and flowering) since last autumn -- their second flush of flowers this year was fairly disappointing, and they were showing signs of being embarrassingly perennial ;-p
The replacement calendulas that I planted in the expectation that the first pair would die off after setting seed are now themselves in bloom and setting seed, and I have at least one more self-sown one that I have allowed to grow on. And the old plant was occupying a large pot that could be more profitably used for other purposes!
I have rescued (and repotted into an old grape punnet, the largest container I then had available) a single dwarfed and starved Roma tomato plant, which was surplus to requirements and being thrown away; I don't know whether kind treatment and plenty of water can induce it to put out any more shoots beyond its current single stem with a few pairs of leaves on. Despite its small size it has a single pear-shaped fruit which will presumably ripen, although I think the odds of getting any further flowers out of the plant are not good. However apparently one of the 'virtues' of the Roma tomato for culinary purposes is that it produces very few seeds, which might be awkward...!
This variety is supposedly a non-hybrid bush tomato, so I thought it might be worth propagating, having already decided that I'm not going to bother saving any seed from the heritage cherry tomatoes. Apparently it is actually possible to take tomato cuttings, at least if you can induce the plant to send out side shoots -- might be an interesting project/experiment?
My thyme plant was looking very sick and massively dying back, which I assumed was due to its being pot-bound -- every time I watered it all the water just ran straight through. But when I tried repotting it there seemed to be very little root under the tangle of woody stems, which is presumably why the outer parts were all wilting; there was nothing in there but the original heavy clay soil and a lot of gravel stones, and I suspect that in my desperate attempts to keep everything alive the thyme may well have been suffering from over-watering causing root rot.
I repotted it into compressed coir-based compost to see if that would save it, and although all the wilted sections have now succumbed (and with leaves obstinately clinging on, so that I can't even strip them for use as dried herbs) the remaining few green shoots among all the woody dead branches seem to have perked up and look as if they will survive. But that may simply be the much more cautious watering regime! To be fair, it was absolutely impossible even to see the earth in the pot previously, far less touch it to gauge its moisture, and the pot was always desperately light to handle and apparently retaining no water at all...
My rudbeckias are now fully out, and looking very exotic -- this is what the chrysanthemums from last year were *supposed* to look like, creamy coloured with a striking contrast centre, instead of a uniform corn-marigold yellow!
Addendum: my garlic is busy shooting up multiple green stems like a pot of chives (I should probably have split the cloves...!), and several of the strawberry runners have successfully rooted and been detached, which probably means I should dispose of the large parent plant that failed to flower this year. (That one flower did set one single fruit...)